Open Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Transit Agencies (2015)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

44 • Only provide GTFS and website information to public. All other data are restricted to the Metropolitan Plan- ning Organization (MPO), government agencies and research entities by request. The survey asked what agencies do if they discover irre- sponsible users. Among the responses were 15 indicating that this situation has not occurred. Several responders indi- cated that they have a policy in place to handle this situation but have never had to exercise it. • Limit or terminate/cancel access (some by revoking the key that developers receive when they register to use the data). • Block the data. • Contact/follow-up directly with the publisher and user, and try to resolve the issue. • Limit access and monitor the public sites or API. • If it is an incorrect time/broken app, do nothing and let the market sort itself out through reviews and other means. • Ignore them. • Probably would let the active developer community publicize the offender. • We identify our and data consumers’ responsibilities in the terms of use. We take no responsibility if someone violates those terms. • No misuse of data to date, but periodically ask new developers to please comply with the terms of use if they are not. The few that were encountered apologized and corrected immediately. • 1. Verbal warning to stop. 2. Remove their access to the feed. • We issue a license key for each user however so we would simply revoke the key of any irresponsible user. • If a trademark or copyright violation, it would be referred to legal for review. • For real-time data access can be blocked and the key can be revoked. Just more than half (29 or 50.9%) of the survey responses show that agencies require a license or agreement to use the agency’s open data. Almost 60% of the respondents (16 responses of 27) said that they require acknowledgment of a license agreement before a third party accesses the open data. Just more than 83% of the respondents (25 responses of 30) note that they do not require another type of registration before a third party accesses and uses the data. The respondents’ license agreements cover a variety of items, the most common of which is the right to use the agency’s data. The next most common item is the limitation on data availability (nonguarantee of data availability), accu- racy or timeliness, and the third most common is the liability limitations for missing or incorrect data. The remaining items and the frequency of their occurrence are shown in Table 11. Almost all of the survey respondents (54 or 98.2%) have experienced no legal issues resulting from the release of their data to the public. Figure 34 shows the steps taken by the survey respondents to disclose their data publicly. Those who responded that they took “other” steps to disclose their data reported the following: • Accepted Google’s request • All of above (meaning all of the choices for this ques- tion in the survey) were done for corporate reasons, but enabled open data publication • Developers page on agency website • Open data are available through a local development environment (ITS Factory) • Developed license agreement • Work with developers • Our data were already accurate and used via web ser- vices developed for internal purposes. Internal purposes turned out to be similar needs for external developers, just a few minor tweaks based on comments that actu- ally improved it chapter four SURVEY RESULTS: LEGAL AND LICENSING ISSUES AND PRACTICES

TABLE 11 ITEMS COVERED IN LICENSE AGREEMENTS Items Covered in License Agreement Number of Respondents Percent Right to use the agency’s data 20 71.4 Nonguarantee of data availability, accuracy, or timeliness 19 67.9 Liability limitations for missing or incorrect data 18 64.3 Agency’s right to alter data without notice or liability 17 60.7 Data ownership 15 53.6 Use and placement of copyrighted logos and images 14 50.0 Indemnity from technical malfunctions due to users’ use of data 13 46.4 Limitations on use of data 13 46.4 Indemnity from legal actions against data users 12 42.9 Indemnification 9 32.1 Termination 5 17.9 Licensing fees and royalties 3 10.7 Quality control 3 10.7 Other: Applicable law Caveat to be provided when data published Do not overwork servers by requesting more data than necessary License is implicit with the use of the data We use acceptance of terms of use Differs for web services and static data sets. It is very liberal. http://www.transitchicago.com/developers/terms.aspx No license in place yet, only agreement with app developers, MA DOT provides GTFS access without license. From survey responses. FIGURE 34 Data disclosure practices (from survey responses).